Hi I was hoping I could pick your brains about this if anyone has the time!-

I'm going to set up a file server for a record label who's office has fewer than 20 people. I would like it to have > 2TB storage on RAID 5. (To beat their current 2TB on a single disk). I feel like I have a pretty good candidate with this server from here:

1U Server - with 4 x Hot-swap SATA (1156pin)
Dual-Core 2.8GHz - Intel Pentium G6950 - 3MB, 533 MHz, 1156pin
4GB memory
@abmx.com
I can pick this up locally to avoid shipping but will have to pay CA state sales tax.
About $1000 if I use software RAID, or a little over $1400 w/ their recommended RAID controller- LSI 3Ware 9650SE-4LPML

I will buy 4 of these WD RE3 drives: (1TB for $160 w/ TLER for RAID)
@newegg.com

How am I doing here? Am I spending too much? Where do YOU shop for fair priced servers? Would you consider a cheap 2nd hand PowerEdge or something - replacing the SCSI controller with an economical HighPoint RAID controller that supports 4 or 8 SATA2 drives..?

They are prepared to spend some money but I'd really don't want to waste money on anything too overkill. They are friends and also people I work for on occasion. I want them to think I did them a good deed and also keep calling me up when they need help.

I don't mean to open the can of worms about hardware RAID vs software RAID because the answer is clearly that hardware RAID is better. But for a simple file server? I could afford to get an 8 bay 2U server with room to grow if i didn't spend the cash on that fancy controller. However, I would love for them to see a red LED light up on the server when a drive fails. What would you do?

Last but not least. I'm planning on using ubuntu server + samba. Without starting a "which distro is best" thread, can any one warn me if ubuntu is a poor choice for a file server that they can just turn on an forget about? I've been cutting my teeth on Fedora/Ubuntu for a couple years now. I can still benefit from the ease of use an community support for ubuntu, but I'm not afraid to get my hands a little dirty if there is truly a better choice. But I don't want to curse at the computer. I just want to get the job done!

If you read this far, thanks! I'd really appreciate some tips!

Many PowerEdge models have PERC cards (PowerEdge RAID Controllers). PE is designed for the kind of use you intend but is priced accordingly. Many of the newer ones use SAS drives and a SAS PERC Raid Controller. The older ones often had SCSI drives. SCSI is generally faster than ATA but you pay for the difference. We run a lot of the Dell servers here and have used everything from PERC 2 up through PERC 6..

I'd definitely go with hardware RAID like that over software RAID. Software RAID uses system memory and CPU for RAID control whereas a hardware card will do the work on its own.

RAID 5 is definitely better than a single disk. However it is important some sort of monitoring be done so you known when a drive has failed. A 2nd drive failing before the first one is replaced and rebuilt will cause you to lose the whole RAID 5. That's why many are recommending RAID 6 and RAID 10 now as they can survive 2 disk failures.

I think I might consider using Opensuse. It seems to have more support for servers and odd raid cards and arrays. Just my opinion.

There is little use for a software raid to my thinking.

Not a very useful form factor unless you need to stack them. I'd consider a normal case instead. Be sure you get an enterprise level NIC. They tend to improve servers a lot.

Fedora/RHEL/CentOS also have a lot of support for the PERC Controllers. Since I've not used many others (well maybe a compaq one) I can't say what they use but a lot of this is OEM anyway. (e.g. most the PERC stuff came from LSI).

I'd stay away from Fedora for this system as it has a short lifespan unless you like upgrading once or twice a year.

Some random comments/things to think about:

It is going to be a pure fileserver (ie, not do other stuff as well) and these people are ordinary end users, with ordinary end user demands for the file server? (Samba for windows users?)

Not a particularly fast processor, but then that shouldn't be a problem.

The one thing that I wouldn't use is one of those cheap, on-the-motherboard, RAID chips. I haven't got recent experience with them, but my rather ancient experience suggests that some of the johnny-come-lately add-on multi-disk-channels/RAID chip suppliers don't do a good job, and saving money by going for the cheap hardware is inviting trouble further down the line.

I'd rather take my chances on MD RAID than the cheapo raid-chip suppliers.

OTOH, 3Ware, adaptec and people like that are probably sufficiently experienced to avoid these problems.

From the spec:
I was expecting to see the word 'enterprise', but the designed-for-RAID aspect seems to be what you want. And consumer drives don't usually have a 5 year warranty.

Not for me, but I've only used the older RAID controller chips.

Not sure that this is clear:

• when you say hardware RAID, it is probably software/firmware running on another processor. This isn't a big performance gain if the main processor has the horsepower to do what it has to do. If it hasn't, that's a different matter.
• As I've said, I'd rather have software RAID than 'cheap'/'bad'/'low end' (whichever is the best description), because I feel that the error recovery is more sophisticated, but performance would be impacted if you don't have enough main processor performance.

Ensure that they have a good an easy way of making backups and that they understand that RAID doesn't stop them having to have backups and ensure that they get done.

For any server, you want it to be supportable for a long period...so an Ubuntu LTS release would not be a bad choice...but there are other things that wouldn't be a bad choice, either. I certainly wouldn't want a standard Ubuntu release...they just don't keep repos open for long enough.

The one thing that I would about with Ubuntu is that they have a habit of running services just because you have installed them; that's a bit dangerous, if you don't know about it, but not too bad if you do.

Hi all, I really appreciate all the helpful info, thanks!

I am definitely going to figure out a local and remote backup plan along with the RAID 5..

@salasi- It's going to be strictly a file server, to be honest, I think the demands of the end users will be fairly minimal. Since it is a record label, they will be using the server for music, pictures, video for current releases etc. They currently have a little over 1 TB worth of data. I'm putting more thought into this than I need to. I'm using this opportunity to educate myself!

Most of the computers in the office are windows, and there are a few Macs there too. Currently, every user has access to every other user's folder. They have adopted this guy John's folder to be used as the "public" folder. It's kind of a mess. I have configured Samba on my testing server to give each user access to a private personal folder, a public folder, and /tmp. I think it's going to be a big improvement.


They want it in a rack. They have one 2U PowerEdge as an email server and about 20+ spaces of empty rack. Someone talked them into buying this huge rack case when they got their very first non-desktop computer. I decided to get a 2U with 8 drive bays and just fill 4 of them to start, with room to grow.

That sounds like good advice about the NIC. I presume that a kick-ass NIC isn't going to do much good without also using a kick-ass switch? What if the server has a kick-ass NIC and the network has a kick-ass switch, but the clients have crappy NICs? Assuming that the switch is run-of-the-mill... How about link aggregation with 2 non-ass-kickin NICs- Is that something to think about?

As far as RAID is concerned, I need to go the SATA route. I don't think we can afford an "Enterprise" option! I've decided to go with the SATA2 3Ware 9650SE-LPML controller. Seems like there is support for a decent selection of Linux distros. I'm also hoping that the extra few $ hundos for the nicer card will bail me out some day if there is ever a problem.

Thanks again you guys.

If you buy a 1U server, consider the sound production. They have to put in a lot of small fans to keep the thing cool and those fans run very fast, hence producing a lot of noise. My 3U servers I bought can hardly be heard, while I cannot have a decent conversation next to such an 1U server.

If you don't buy HW RAID, stay away from fake RAID or BIOS RAID as many mainboards come with now. Management options are minimal, and I have not been able to get it to work again after installing Linux on such a system and tried to simulate a disk failure. Linux RAID is much, much better, and BIOS RAID uses the CPU cycles of you main processor anyway. I have done some pretty deep things with Linux RAID and I was surprised by the transparency and the options to recover from errors. I mean human errors, configuration, build, assemble, add and remove actions.

jlinkels

You could go with an AMD system to save more money. The quality is the same. The great thing about AMD processors even their desktop processors includes ECC memory support. You do not need a fast processor for a file server. You need fast IO for a file server. I suggest Western Digital Raptor or Western Digital VelociRaptor if you need high throughput.

Software RAID and hardware RAID are a matter of preference. If you are going with Western Digital VelociRaptor drives, a hardware RAID is better since these drives consumes processor resources for their performance. If you are going with software and want RAID-5 or RAID-6, it is best to use separate controllers for each drive being added to the array.

For any server, I suggest separate the drives for the operating system and the file server. The reason to do this is if the operating system fails, the data for the employees is OK. Also any upgrades to the software will not affect the data for the employees. Third the computer can access both the operating system files and data for the employees about the same time.

I would just make my own server and document the setup as much as possible. The distribution I might use is CentOS or use OpenSolaris with its ZFS. CentOS is the same as Redhat Enterprise Linux, so any Linux certified techs will easily feel at home. If you are thinking about OpenSolaris and think it is too narrow in its hardware and software selections, go with either Nexenta or NexentaStor.

If you do not want to build your own server, but need more of a selection and cheaper price than Dell or HP. I suggest Aberdeen Inc. I have used them for my first computer build about a decade ago. They make sure the products are compatible with each other compared to other companies. There are others which can be found by searching with Google's similar site option.